So It Begins: School

Being a good man often enough means doing stuff that kind of sucks because it needs to be done (like taking out the compost that I had to deal with yesterday... ew). All kinds of really cool opportunities are coming on to win some good-man points because the children start school on Monday (August 3 seems really early for that, but I'm not crying about them having somewhere to be for half the day and something more to do than lay on their beds and make messes that I get to clean up with my wife -- everyday romance?). The older of the two, who should be named "Angry Moody," starts high school, in fact, so today she had orientation. Of course, the school offered a bus service, being awesome, but didn't actually provide any notice of when the busses would run (or, for that matter, that orientation was going to happen; we found out luckily through the grapevine). We got up butt-early to get the child up from her normal nocturnal state at around dawn (which is her usual cue to head for bed), I started doing the dishes from last night which were an immense pile (without the half dozen more crusty ones I found in the child's room or left somewhere else in the house that she sat down and apparently lost too much energy to care about taking them back to the kitchen, rinsing out, or -- heaven forbid -- washing). The child wandered out to wait for the bus way earlier than necessary, just in case (mark one point for her prudence, which she'll lose later in the story if the dishes didn't already have her in the negative). Adorably, I checked every couple of minutes to see if she had been picked up yet, and then, while I scrubbed for about ten minutes at one point, she seemed to disappear. All was right with the world.

Wrong. The child came into the house about two minutes later: "The bus driver looked right at me, looked away, and kept on going." The bus driver has pulled this stunt several times. Of course my double-secret club "Blame the Children First" leads me to believe that the child has given up and is sitting somewhere that's not-at-all obvious to anyone so far as waiting for a ride is concerned. Still, the bus driver has pulled this stunt a few times, today included. So... I finished the dishes and drove the child to the school, which was a circus, of course. Here's my favorite part: a lot of kids had their parents going in with them. I said to the child, "would you like it if I went in with you?" The child somehow had already passed out of the door to the car, which was locked (magical powers might have been involved) and was running away before I got the question all the way out. I heard "bye" trail back from her amid enthusiastic "I'm in high school" giggling/squealing. I'm pretty glad I didn't go in.

I came home to find out that in the rush to make herself duly pretty for high school (she looked a bit on the wearing-enough-makeup-to-stand-on-a-corner-somewhere side of things, actually, but we let her be her own person), she had taken my wife's little jar of cosmetics and cosmetics accessories, dumped it out to get at some little brush or something, and left the dumped-out pile all over the shelf in the bathroom closet. There goes that point. Of course, her room looks literally like a rat's nest, there was that mess, the dishes-thing hasn't been forgotten, and she somehow had time to sit in a chair and draw a picture of a Japanese woman with a cat while bitching about how the bus drivers make her so angry that she could cuss them out while all of that mess sat there waiting for us, not her, to find it. Let's retally, then: one point for prudence, minus ten for all that bullcrap puts her right about at normal: nine points in the red, and it's still butt-early.

On a happier note, I got all of the dishes done, had romantic cappuccino with my wife, and got an earlier start on what looks like it's going to be a busy day for me as well.